I recently made a decision to take a sabbatical from my executive marketing gig and risk failure. Brash? I guess so. Gauging my friend and family’s reactions I received after sharing my shocking news, I could tell this wasn’t something often done by people in their circles of influence. That’s the problem with putting yourself out there – people judge.
Now you have to understand something about me. I move quickly, in all areas of my life. Sometimes my “proactive decision making” has led me down the wrong path, but for the most part, when I listen to my intuition and forge ahead, it works out for me. I latched onto Educator Eloise Ristad’s quote many years ago and it naturally became an internal mantra for me.
“When we give ourselves permission to fail, we, at the same time, give ourselves permission to excel.”
Ristad educated people on overcoming failure to achieve performance success. She believed that by delving into your negative failure mind chatter, you are released. If you take the challenge of going into what you think you don’t want, deliberately, something let’s go. She believed we are all performers every day of our lives and we constantly seek ways to breakthrough to another level of comfort to actually find the luxury in what we are doing rather than the hard-edged kind of trying that gets us into so much trouble. Ristad had such an incredible faith in how changeable we all are and believed we were stuck in a pessimistic mode that requires us to shake up our frame of reference so that we can put the pieces together in a different way. She further illustrated how improvisation is our way of being: we don’t plan all our words and actions in advance; we’re only afraid of failures when we’re doing something ‘important’.
So now I am pointed in a new direction and it is important. I am following a dream I’ve had since I was a little girl. I’m going to put my award-winning marketing expertise aside and focus on becoming a bestselling author and speaker.
I am very committed to this goal and after the last year and a half I endured, it should be a magnetic and juicy book that gives people relationship encouragement and support in their own difficulties. I am going to let go of my negative mind chatter when it presents itself and breakthrough to a new me.
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